I'm sitting in the Imposter Panel, though not an official blogger for this particular session, I am just overwhelmed by the sheer number of people in here. It's great to know thta I'm clearly not the only one that often feels like an imposter in various technical situations. These women on the panel, in addition to all being very funny, are all very insightful. They are all so very accomplished, yet they al feel like (or have felt like) imposters at one time or another.
Dr. Williams made a great comment: "I am the creator of my own experience."
Essentially, nobody ever told her she was an imposter, she was telling herself she was. So, she decided to stop telling herself that, and her confidence gets better & better every day.
The entire panel was wonderful - I just wish there were more hours in the day to attend sessions at Grace Hopper. They all seem to end too soon.
My computer woes have gotten worse and worse - now my networking driver is failing to attach, the wired connection is working, so I assume this is an additional hardware issue. Oh, and the CPU is throwing errors now, too. So, that brand new laptop has become a very expensive, slow to boot, word processor (does "vi" count as word processing software?). One of the fanstastic Sun recruiters lent me her laptop, and I ran off to the imposter session, desperate to upload my last blog from my thumb drive. Alas, this session was so crowded, I couldn't obtain an IP address! But, small wonders keep happening at this converence - a wonderful woman sitting next to me offered me her laptop, where I'm blogging from right now.
Valerie Fenwick
... a view into The Grace Hopper Celebration!
You captured the essence of Dr Williams's comment really well. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI loved the impostor panel so much that I've created a google group to continue the conversation that was started there.
ReplyDeletehttp://groups.google.com/group/women-in-computing-imposters
Please consider joining, even if you weren't at Grace Hopper this year.